Other Voices: Heartsick, Weary From Cuba's New Crackdown On Freedom

April 07, 2003|By MYRIAM MARQUEZ Orlando Sentinel

Dissent

This time, it's personal. As the world focused on the war with Iraq, communist Cuba cracked down on dissidents, and independent journalists and people running home libraries. At last count, 78 men and women are behind bars. This is not a new tactic on the island that has been ruled by Fidel Castro since 1959, but this time it hit me with a wallop.

My chest tightened as I scrolled through an e-mail that listed the names of the detainees. I knew several of them -- had spent time with them in Cuba last year. We had talked about their dreams and hopes, their commitment to bring peaceful change and progress to a country stuck in a time warp of Cold War contradictions. Back then, many of them -- like Jose Daniel Ferrer Garcia, a 32-year-old husband and father who I interviewed in Santiago -- were courageously rounding up signatures for the Varela Project, a petition drive for reforms that former President Jimmy Carter praised during his trip to Cuba last May.

Right-wingers in the Cuban exile community have never liked the Varela Project, named after a 19th-century Cuban priest and spearheaded by Cuban human-rights activist Oswaldo Paya, who has received international acclaim for his efforts. They don't like it because Paya seeks changes through Cuba's socialist constitution.

As of this writing, prominent dissidents such as Paya haven't been arrested. He has the international cachet, after all. Nevertheless, his freedom feeds the far right's conspiracy theories that paint Paya as a regime plant.

Juan Hernandez Acen, a spokesman for Cuba's diplomatic mission in Washington, told me last week all Cubans can express their opinion, but the ones arrested "crossed the line."

How? By getting too close to James Cason, the diplomatic chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. In his first year in Cuba, Cason has held journalism conferences for Cuba's independent journalists, handed out books not approved by the Cuban government, and traveled throughout the country to meet Varela Project organizers.

"There's a course of action that must respond to the politics of hostility that the United States has engaged in the last few weeks," Hernandez said. "Mr. Cason has obviously undertaken initiatives that have been an affront to the Cuban people's dignity."

Ah, there's that word. Dignity. It is colored through a political prism in Cuba that's foreign to most people who don't fear governments that thrive on different political parties and points of view.

Cuba is preparing an immigration conference in April to bring together moderate Cuban-Americans and other Cubans living abroad -- a move that has divided many in Miami's hotbed of exile machinations. Yet recent surveys show that a majority of Cuban-Americans in South Florida support the conference and attempts at peaceful change and reconciliation in Cuba. Even 47 percent of those exiles surveyed who arrived in the 1960s, by far the most conservative among Cuban-Americans, believe the conference has merit.

Could it be that such a turn to moderation by most exiles frightens Cuba? Is it more convenient for the communist government to rail against a hostile Uncle Sam and keep the status-quo embargo?

I could rail about tyranny. I could point to the 1960s firing squads, the broken promises, the splitting up of families, including my own. So many of us are tired of looking back. We want Cuba's people to move forward.

Some moderates in Miami who were willing to stick their necks out and attend the April conference now are talking boycott. Their good will has been spent. The Cuban government says it wants dialogue, but its actions point once again to polarizing intransigence.

Marquez is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. She may be reached at mmarquezorlandosentinel.com